Economy Disrupted: The View from Phoenix

[Music] welcome back to economy disrupted i'm matthew goodman senior vice president for economics at csis in washington and we're just delighted to have you with us again today i want to start by thanking our sponsor haumet aerospace corporation for making this series possible we very much appreciate the support of our sponsors thank you and i'm joanna shelton senior associate at csis and co-host today with matt in this series we're taking a look at four key disrupters affecting the u.s economy and u.s international competitiveness those are trade technology climate change and a changing workforce this week we're focused on economic disruptors in the great city of phoenix arizona and in a minute we'll be joined by the phoenix mayor but before we uh introduce her we're going to play a short video to sort of set the scene so please roll the tape phoenix is the capital of arizona and the fifth most populous city in the united states home to over 1.6 million people phoenix has been the fastest growing city in the past five years built in 1867 on the pueblo grande ruins at the junction of the salt and gila rivers phoenix's economy was initially centered around the five seas cattle cotton citrus copper and climate the development of the railroad in 1887 allowed the local economy to expand beyond the original five seas motorola's rival in 1949 shifted phoenix's economy toward high-tech industries ushering their arrival of electronics and aerospace companies such as general electric and ibm today phoenix remains a regional tech hub with aboriginal biotechnology sector and intel and on semi calling the city home the phoenix metro area's biggest exports are electronic products transportation equipment and machinery which are primarily exported to mexico canada and china the city's largest employment sectors are trade transportation and utilities professional and business services and education and health services climate change is a growing challenge for phoenix threatening the city's water supply inducing urban heat islands and producing more severe wildfires the city plans to update its 2009 climate action plan by investing 110 million in climate projects today phoenix's leadership has stated its commitment to diversifying the economy strengthening infrastructure investment and working to make phoenix a leader in sustainability and with that we're delighted to be joined by the mayor of phoenix kate gallego mayor gallego delighted to have you with us thank you so much for inviting me to join the conversation all right thanks and let me say before i start asking um the first question to our audience you're always as always you're welcome to submit your own questions there should be a link on your screen um to which you can submit questions and we'll be taking those after joanna and i ask a few questions ourselves of the mayor so mayor gallego let me start with climate change because that's one of the issues that we've been uh tracking on this program and of course it's a it's a national um issue now the biden administration has been uh very focused on this in the last eight nine months of its administration um it's hot in in phoenix i although i understand it's not yet 100 degrees today but i guess it's going to be going up to 100 degrees and more seriously this uh changing climate has created a number of challenges in in the state of arizona and around phoenix wildfires and um uh urban heat and um and water scarcity issues and um and to meet this challenge we understand you've got something called a plan to make the city heat ready which is based as i understand it on something the national weather service has called stormready can you explain a little what that means um to our viewers who at least like me probably haven't heard of that term absolutely so the city takes heat and climate change very seriously and i might start with a little bit just about my background i hold an environmental studies degree and my first involvement in the city was actually chairing what was then known as the environmental quality commission which advises the city on environmental issues we helped the city develop the first renewable energy goal the first climate action plan which we are now updating and really improving upon and one of the things that's been clear to me throughout my time both as a volunteer and now as an elected official at the city of phoenix is that he requires a whole of government approach that we need every part of the city whether it's our public works folks who are in charge of trash recycling and buildings to our streets department to the folks who work in human services and serve our most vulnerable to be looking towards climate change so we developed a heat ready program to try to take what we had learned from heat and make it a rec replicable program that other cities could use so how do you think ahead to what some of the challenges are going to be and prepare this year it was something we were able to share a lot with communities in the pacific northwest we had that significant heat wave in the pacific northwest and many of those mayors hadn't had to deal with the climate change challenges we have so we're hopeful by giving other communities a tool and just can you think about how it affects all of your city operations and all of your residents that you can be better prepared previously many people put climate change just in one office often environmental programs or whatever is the equivalent and what we have found is that it is much broader than that can you just give a couple of examples of how that works and what it's exactly going to do and how it's going to affect people's day-to-day lives we are really looking at our most vulnerable populations and so where can people go if they don't have access to air conditioning water um how do we build transportation corridors particularly in the area where people are most likely to be walking or bicycling that are cool we're looking a lot at our built environment we have the largest cool pavement program for american cities and that's a program where we put a cooler colored coating on the streets as as my four-year-old will often remind me don't wear black when it's hot because you'll get much hotter and we're taking that same common sense lesson to our streets we had a great partnership we have a great partnership with arizona state university and they just released data this week showing about a 10 to 12 degree local cooling effect where we had that wider coating on the streets so it's still in pilot phase but it's still the largest program of its type in the united states and has proven to be very successful my father is not particularly interested in the science of atmospheric chemistry and climate change but he does tell me if i can do something about the heat in the summer i'm likely to be able to continue in public life here it is a good bipartisan issue great well that's really interesting and i'm i'm eager to learn more about those solutions uh it's it's hot here in washington as well and we probably could benefit from some of those um some of those solutions that's very interesting let me ask just one more follow-up which is that's sort of an adaptation measure but obviously to really deal with climate change we're going to need to move away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and nuclear and and that's where i want to start because you have one of the largest if not the largest nuclear power plants what 50 miles um outside phoenix and um and that's uh obviously potentially one of the solutions to move away from fossil fuels but there are some who say among other controversial issues that it's not as cost effective maybe as solar or or wind energy and it uses a lot of water and given the water challenges out there um you know maybe that's not the best answer for you how do you think about that sort of combination of solutions of renewable and nuclear energy so the palo verde nuclear generating station which is in arizona is at least at the time it was built the largest inland nuclear power facility the city does not operate a power company but we are a partner indirectly because we take a lot of our waste water and it goes towards that facility and so there's a very significant pipeline out of phoenix that that goes to power that particular facility uh it is most famous because there was a it was being cited while bill and ted's excellent adventure was being filmed in phoenix area and there are a bunch of signs around it in the movie so it's oddly enough when i most get asked about uh that particular facility is is for particularly of people of a certain generation there was a lot of civic debate then as there continues to be about whether nuclear makes sense as an inland power generation facility and certainly the water challenges are something we think about often okay well let me uh turn it over to joanna to take on the next topic well this is actually a good segue to the topic that i'm going to ask you about and that is technology my question is what is it about phoenix i mean you have attracted some of the worlds and america's leading firms in semiconductors biotechnology aerospace and defense you have more firms both from the united states and abroad who are planning new investments in phoenix and the question is how have you done this are there special business or economic policies that you have adopted is it your educational system workforce preparedness other factors uh if you could just please explain how phoenix has become such a central player in this high-tech world thank you it's taken a lot of preparation and great partnerships to get where we are i would say number one has definitely been our people we have the great university partners led by arizona state university perhaps the largest college in the country producing a lot of talented graduates and we have wonderful partners in our apprenticeship programs community colleges and others that are also helping with that manufacturing workforce so the first thing i hear about when companies are looking here is the ability to hire the right talented workforce for technology fields that is certainly true as well for biotech which is definitely driven by intellectual capital and so the combination of the universities as well as we have a very robust hospital system that tends to have um many more hospital companies than other cities of our size so there are some cities that are dominated by one healthcare group and we have a whole robust ecosystem here we've also invested in partnership with the state of arizona in precision medicine so we invested in the translational genomics institute t-gen to try to create some of that intellectual capital and that has spun off many companies i hope i would never wish on anyone to have a cancer diagnosis in the family but if you do advanced genotyping to try to get cures that are best or treatments that are best for your cancer it's very likely that a phoenix-based company might be help helping you process and get that all-important data i'm very hopeful that the path to cure cancer will go through phoenix and that some of the investments we are making will be important to that we also do have a good business environment i was just at a an opening of a e-commerce company and they said the speed to market here was unlike anything they'd ever experienced before in the united states we do concierge business service and really help someone from permits all the way through opening and they can help whether your challenge is traffic management for your business or getting uh your product exported from our airport and that has been very helpful as well well that's interesting because i know that in many cities around the country when one hears complaints that are levied by businesses often just the licensing and the processes and the red tape that they have to go through to be approved is a big stumbling block for them so it's interesting to hear how effectively you've been able to to manage that when you talk about the whole biotechnology area i'm interested and wonder if you could just expand a little bit on the phoenix biomedical campus which has been a city initiative and as i understand it you've joined with state universities in arizona and the biotech sector to create this combined collaborative research center and i'm wondering what was the impetus behind that and um speaking of bureaucracy and red tape were there any particular bureaucratic barriers you had to cut through in order to gain the collaborative collaborative approach that has been shown in this area so that campus actually started with professional football the city of phoenix assembled a lot of land to try to make a bid for the arizona cardinals stadium the stadium went to our neighboring city of glendale arizona and we moved forward with creating a bio a bioscience campus in that area from my perspective i think we got the better end of that deal because it's created so much economic investment i have a friendly relationship with the mayor of houston and do sometimes mention that we're now opening more healthcare facilities than they are which has really come out of this campus it brought together multiple universities we have northern arizona university university of arizona and asu all working together with t-gen which i mentioned earlier as well as several nih-funded institutes uh one on kidney science brain science and really coming together with uh several areas of excellence um we then found that we needed more space for startups to go and we partnered with a group called wexford that created more innovative spaces i had the chance to visit other cities and some of the startup facilities they've done and really felt like wexford's got the best of um how do you create spaces for innovative companies but also opportunities for people to connect our campus is right by our arts district and it's it's been very helpful with all the downtown amenities to attracting talent which we know is key we're also very close to our theaters and our professional baseball professional basketball facilities and all of those amenities i think have added to its success we've learned that with college graduates phds doctors they pick the city in which they want to live before applying job for jobs in in the majority of cases although certainly not all and so having the best state-of-the-art equipment mattered but also just having a great community where you can uh enjoy outdoors amenities and and have good schools for your your kids we have a bioscience high school in the area and that has been also very helpful because we have parents who care so much about their kids future and when those top scientists are picking locations uh that's been a an attractive amenity as well that sounds like quite an infrastructure there an ecosystem for innovation and uh and tech if i can just uh make one other ask one other question just uh not too long so we don't have too much time but matt already alluded to the fact that the nuclear plant is a big water user and so are your high-tech industries i mean semiconductors in particular are big water users big energy users and i'm just wondering given the stresses caused by climate change and the stresses on the water supply how do you deal with these trade-offs here big job creators big uh you know they generate a lot in the economic engine for for phoenix but how can you make sure that there's enough water available in the future for not only the tech production but also other businesses households and other users we take our commitment to provide water incredibly seriously we have a state law that requires us to have a 100 year water supply and so we look very closely at how we are able to meet that phoenix has a diverse water system that serves our community we are served by several different river systems and that helps a lot if there is for example drought in one system the um that has sometimes helped us with um having water coming from more areas we also have a robust groundwater supply and we are adding to that so that if we should have an even longer sustained drought that will give us options and then we have partnerships with several cities in our community as well as tribal communities that give us more water supplies on which to draw so we've really tried to build an incredibly diverse water system with a lot of infrastructure but we also put conservation as one of our key values we recognize that we are a desert city and we ask everyone in our community to take that seriously with their decisions yeah well thank you and with that over to you matt okay so let me try another topic uh if if we can you're very kind to go so broad across a number of interesting topics to us at least um and and this is trade so trade is something that's very much a part of the conversation here in washington it's a controversial issue um and a lot of people think it's a a disruptive force that that we should somehow try to you know reduce or avoid the the pain of trade but our sense from other um mayors and governors we've talked to is that the perspective on trade out out in the rest of the country may be a little bit different from the conversation we're having here in washington i wonder kind of what does trade mean it's a it's a part of your economy and a lot of jobs related one way or another to trade how do you think about that out in phoenix global companies employ about 88 000 residents in the phoenix region and then we have very robust trade partnerships led by our relationship with mexico that is our our top trading partner and then significant as you said in the introduction partnerships globally including with canada we see a lot of foreign direct investment from canada and companies that are helping us whether it be give the equipment to modernize actually a lot of our water equipment canadian companies have been partners with us on and we have found that it has helped improve the daily lives of our residents so many of the fastest growing industries you mentioned semiconductors it's really been those trade relationships what's being built here is going all over the world those of us in local government sometimes differentiate between the type of jobs and industries that spread up that um grow the pie versus those that redivide an existing pie so the general thinking is things like grocery stores it's just however many people you have you need to be able to serve folks with with food but then you have global semiconductor companies coming in and they really grow the wealth in a community and bring so many more new opportunities and investments and also create a more diverse and exciting city we since we've had taiwan semiconductor investment we now have elementary schools that are trying to change their language program and and um it's changing our restaurants it's looking at it it's looking like quite likely it will change our air service and what type of flights you can get in and out of phoenix and it's just um every day i sort of learn new ways that it's helped the city become more diverse with with those big investments well you anticipated my follow-up which was about um about the the foreign investment that you've had in uh phoenix and arizona more broadly but particularly this uh taiwan uh semiconductor manufacturing company which um has i guess existing production there but is is talking about a a big new investment 12 billion dollars is what's been reported um which i guess will come online in 2024 or something i guess you've sort of anticipated this question but how did you how did you attract them why did they come to phoenix instead of um you know somewhere else austin not to uh i guess you mentioned houston i know you there's some competition there but um how did you get how did you get them there tsmc did say that the great semiconductor ecosystem we already have was important they did want the land to be able to do a technology campus which we had available they cared a lot about the ability to continue to operate um throughout the year and phoenix is is blessed with more uh reliable weather it will be sunny that is how the weather will be in phoenix almost every day of the year and and that is important in semiconductor manufacturing because if a facility goes down for power concerns it's incredibly expensive to deal with the aftermath of that um and i can tell you i was talking to a gentleman who's a pipe fitter and he was originally working on building an intel fabrication plant in our the greater phoenix area and is now going to work for tsmc for third on their construction for 30 thousand dollars more than what he was making before which was a very uh significant salary and just seeing how it what that means for his kids and and the next generation and his family was was cool to see sort of on a micro level because sometimes as mayor you get in in the macro we did negotiated that deal during my first year as mayor it was actually my first international trip and i i did have some rookie mayor moments so we had um we were in the community that has the tech park in taiwan and um we were eating a very large lunch they eat very well in taiwan and they brought out multiple courses and they were all sitting there and i was very hungry and it smelled smelled amazing and no one was eating and then one of the people from the u.s commercial service had to be like no one's going to eat until you eat so i was i was starving everyone i'm glad i didn't blow the deal but yeah i was trying to be polite but i didn't realize i was the key ingredient for people yeah yeah that's that's a thing out there um so um so that's great so you do it does require actually working you know with um these partners to try to um and traveling to them to to try to pull them in and and make the case um and then providing i think you anticipated that there again something i was going to ask about your your um you know the new restaurants the new schools mandarin language uh programs and things in in phoenix that both um as a result of this investment but also maybe helps encourage additional um inbound investment i is that the right way to think about that is those the kinds of things that a city benefits from but but has to do and as well to attract uh investment that creates jobs we very much hope to attract the entire ecosystem around tsmc we hope their suppliers will find phoenix to be an attractive market to do business and um that they will then make investments in phoenix and we're trying to make sure we set aside land to accommodate again that entire tech park and ecosystem so it's not just tsmc but the other companies that are key and then we want again as much of the supply chain to be interested as possible and continue to make those investments and i i have committed to folks that are dumpling game is just going to continue to improve as we have more taiwanese investments perhaps from a csis perspective you'd be amused to know that while i was there i was regularly thanked for some of the things one of my predecessors as a phoenix elected official did barry goldwater so he uh 40 years ago helped set up the sister city relationship between phoenix and taipei and we celebrated that that anniversary he was a phoenix city council member before going on to federal service and he was very involved with key pieces of legislation that helped set up the defense relationship between our country and taiwan and our current congressional delegation continues to really invest in in that relationship and be seen as leaders in that area our senator is going to be in taiwan very soon mark kelly and then on a bipartisan basis congressman gallego and congresswoman lesko are also working on some of those relationships so i don't want to say that the city of phoenix landed this deal together there was a lot of geopolitical work and and continues to be in those particular areas and one that i think csis has done a lot of work in that area and so we appreciate these are complicated issues and it's going to be an interesting year for that global relationship i'll just leave it at that yeah thanks well no that is a very uh important set of issues that we're we're focused on and i knew about senator goldwater's um involvement with the taiwan relations act and and so forth but but not about the sister city relationship until i researched this program so that's an interesting connection and a lot more to ask you about that set of issues but i i don't want to abuse our time here so i'm going to move on um to joanna again but let me just again encourage the audience some questions are coming in but we welcome more so uh please submit your questions via the link on your screen and with that over to you joanna well thank you matt and uh mayor our last topic of discussion this morning at least the questions that matt and i are going to ask is about the workforce we talked earlier about the tech center sector and its importance in uh job creation in phoenix but other sectors are also big employers as the video pointed out you have major employment in trade transportation and utilities professional and business services and education and health services and my question to you is how do you prepare your workforce for the jobs and skills that are in demand by today's employers in such a wide diversity of of fields and what special challenges do you face in this area thank you this is an area we work on a lot and i have the privilege of leading the us conference of mayors committee on jobs workforce and education so get to work with some of the thought leaders in this area good news from phoenix is that as of august 31st we've recovered 99.3 percent of the jobs that we lost during the pandemic but we've obviously seen some shifts we're talking a lot at the city about the retail and hotel and tourism job loss and and what we expect in terms of recovery in those areas we've seen much more employment in some of the more logistics driven industries supporting companies such as amazon and at the moment we are thinking some of those shifts will be permanent and then there'll be some recovery so many people during the pandemic if they traveled were more likely to use an airbnb type program as opposed to a full-service hotel those modes have much lower levels of employment you there's just fewer people involved in an airbnb than a full-service hotel we are also trying to understand how much of the retail impacts will be permanent when i studied planning and zoning in a classroom they said you have this many people and so you should set aside so many so many square feet for retail and at this point in phoenix we are going to just let the private market respond and see what we are needed in that area because there may be some some very significant permanent shifts that come out of this time frame as we invest in our workforce we are are trying to allow more programs that um offer significant credentials in partnership with employers there's some economists who've done a lot of great research that the more successful workforce programs have a job at the end um they there used to be a strategy that that a former labor secretary called train and pray where you give someone a lot of training and then you hope it works out and we are trying to really work closely with our employers and entrepreneurs to make sure that we're investing in areas where we expect people to have jobs overwhelmingly at the moment semiconductors is one of those sectors i was talking with the tsmc plant manager and they have hired everyone in the electronics program at our community college and would hire more if they had the opportunity to do so so the extent we can put dollars in partnership to scale programs like that those are amazing jobs that have huge salary potential one of my goals as mayor is for people to have economic mobility to have the salary your parents made not determine the the salary that you make and so we're looking at areas like healthcare manufacturing export-oriented areas as those where where research tells us you're the most likely to be able to make that big jump we also have a huge nursing shortage which i think is true of any mayor in the country and um trying to at the moment address some of the bottlenecks which happen to be clinical rotations so how can we all partner together to make sure there's actually more people who want to be nurses than slots to train them at the moment and that feels like the kind of problem uh that we can solve secretary walsh the us labor secretary was actually just here meeting with some of our nursing educational partners and we talked about some of the national partnerships that might help us in that area as well so we are we are trying to think about what how do we open doors for people to have a huge economic opportunity when we design our workforce programs well that's really quite um impressive i will say and what i'd like to do is just follow up and and drill down a little bit more into the sort of small business sector you've already mentioned retail hotels etc as being those where there's been more disruption due to the covid pandemic but of course as you know as well as anybody else technology has also been a disrupter to a lot of jobs and i just in doing research i noticed that you know fully 94 percent of your businesses in phoenix are small businesses and you know 50 if you look nationwide fully half of the small businesses in the country report that they can't find workers to fill the jobs that are open and that are on offer and the small businesses cannot really compete against the large businesses particularly look at some of those in in phoenix that are able to offer 30 000 more for a pipe fitter or offer much higher salaries and benefits so my question would be and here i would like to sort of just tie in also to the money that phoenix has received from the arpa program the american rescue plan act and just ask how are you addressing these uh workers in the part of the workforce that have been dislocated by by covid and technology change that don't have the skills to move into tsmc or others so if you could maybe just tell a little bit more about what you're doing for that segment of your workforce so first starting with how to get skills and upscale our workforce we actually will be focused on that on our council meeting this week and we're trying to do a significant partnership with the community college to help people get the key credentials in this area one of the things that's important to me is that we do wrap around services so it's not just like here's tuition to go to school but can there be mentorship and people who succeeded in the career path who can help you understand how it works and and what are both the key credentials but also um other ingredients needed for success and so we are very much hoping again looking at sectors where we know there are jobs to invest we have a great community college system and they are our key partner in that particular area for our small businesses we've also set aside dollars specifically for small businesses from the arpa program and that was done intentionally to make sure that we invest in workforce in the area originally when we surveyed our small businesses they said at the beginning of the covid pandemic that what they needed was direct grants many of them particularly our solo entrepreneurs had a hard time qualifying for the federal program and so we really tried to to fill in that gap we we surveyed i think several thousand businesses at the beginning just saying what do you need from us how can we help so first we started with the grant program and then we developed something called a small business toolkit which helps address the challenges that our small business is facing that includes access to capital and we have a great partnership with kiva in that area also just help with um you know a small business owner has to become an expert in everything and so can we help you whether you need help with accounting or permits or whatever it may be we partnered with a lot of the incubators in that area the co-working spaces it turned out maybe weren't as focused during covet 19 on the physical space but they had a lot of resources and capacity to help us support our small businesses and that turned out to take to be a real silver lining for us where we've developed a lot of even stronger partnerships with those facilities and and some of the companies are happy to get help directly from the city but in others the relationships from the co-working and incubators was an ev easier pipeline for us to deliver resources so that's been been positive as well we know that the small businesses are the heart of this city when people tell us they visited phoenix what they loved it is disproportionately the small businesses that are their success stories and and that is overwhelmingly who employs our residents as well well and it is true that small businesses are sort of the the the uh fabric of any city and really add a lot to the life in addition to the larger employers but they're the more public-facing ones as a rule so i wish you the best of luck on all those uh um ambitious plans and now with that i'll turn it back over to matt yeah and i think at this point we'll take a couple of audience questions if you're um prepared for that uh mayor gallego um actually a lot of the audience questions are we anticipated i think some of the good questions that people are asking but there there's a good one here that i want to extend or um uh from which is uh when you were talking about the heat ready um ideas that you were sharing with communities in the northwest this prompted a question to ask you know what other efforts are you doing with states in this case to tackle climate change but i sort of broadened the question to ask about you know how you work with other cities or other levels of government on some of the broadly the economic challenges we've been talking about here and what kinds of opportunities but also challenges are there and those kinds of uh interactions with other um other mayors other governors other you know community leaders we work extensively with other cities on all sorts of challenges including climate change uh one that might be of interest to folks in the csis community is cities are working very aggressively to support our national government in glasgow on climate change led by los angeles mayor eric garcetti there's a global cities race to dear zero challenge where communities are stepping up and saying we'll be carbon net neutral by 2050 and i hope that american cities will really be leading the way in that it was just this morning talking to a mayor of a city outside of arizona encouraging him to sign up for city's race to zero because i think it'll create a lot of political support if you have cities all across the united states and then globally saying we are here and we are going to be part of the solution no national government can address a challenge of this magnitude alone and we also share strategies about how to achieve that so just as we talked with our pacific northwest cities about um how we can help with our most vulnerable population i've been getting a lot of information about fleet modernization and how other cities have really changed their their fleets to address climate change phoenix has been a leader in alternative fuels about 73 of our fleet has is powered by alternative fuels but there are some cities that are that are ahead of us on fancy garbage trucks and um uh police vehicles and i'm learning about that um my police department is willing to drive around in teslas but we have not made that that commitment yet but it but there are cities that are doing that and and so we watch and learn what they are doing we also collaborated i would say a lot globally more so than ever during the covet 19 pandemic it used to be mayors more were more likely to wait until you were in person gatherings to share ideas and one of the benefits of us all being used to sitting in these chairs staring at screens is that that's now easy and a common way to communicate early on in covet it was enormously beneficial to me because i had a chance to talk to italian mayors who were him about uh hit before we were and just about how their medical system had been and morgues had been overwhelmed and that um really inspired me to action um although i i would like to think i was already committed to that we were also able to speak to mayors in china about some of the things that um they had done and then speaking with korean mayors was helpful for me on contact tracing and just seeing what an impact it could be so i feel very lucky to be part of that global community because you really can learn so much from other cities yeah that's a theme we're really picking up in this program we talked to the mayor of dayton ohio nan whaley we talked to um david holt in oklahoma city and they all talked about how there's this really beneficial exchange among mayors that that they've both gained a lot from so uh so you're confirming a kind of a theme here which is which is great okay i think joanna we may have just time for one more question is there another one there that you are inspired by here is one that it's actually it's a little bit off of the four topics but it's very much related to a city's ability to continue to uh to to grow and that is that one side effect of rapid growth in phoenix and of course in many other cities as well is that housing prices also have increased rapidly how does the city perhaps in partnership with the state plan to maintain growth while keeping housing prices affordable and i will add that that's certainly a big issue for your lower income retail and service sector workers and mayor interested in your your comments it is a huge challenge for us in the city of phoenix we want everyone who works in our city to be able to afford to live in the city we have been the fastest growing city in the nation and that that interest in moving to our city has outpaced the growth in housing supply so we've seen dramatic increases in price and and we're trying to tackle it from a variety of different strategies so we passed an affordable housing plan unanimously at the city of phoenix and that looks at strategies from increasing the supply to reducing regulatory barriers and then being more flexible about some of our programs to help people live in our city we're taking a lot of our city on real estate and saying how can it be part of the affordable housing supply we looked at how we build new housing and how we incentivize it we're even putting affordable housing advocates in more leadership positions like advisory boards and we are putting a huge amount of our federal dollars in towards trying to address housing challenges the private sector is also trying to step up we work together on trying to again that all famous construction workforce and how can we make sure there are more people to work on these projects if you want a job in construction right now they are available in this market but but it's it's we're hearing from people on fixed income and people starting out some real challenges these days yeah okay over to you matt okay well unfortunately we are running uh close to time but let me ask you the question that we ask all of our guests which is um you know we are a think tank based in washington dc and we work on foreign policy um and that is something that both actually the trump administration its own way and the biden administration have focused on the importance of foreign policy uh being working for for all americans um the biden administration has a has a term foreign policy for the middle class um but that term may not mean anything to some people what does it mean in phoenix does it have resonance with you um to your constituents it does yesterday city hall celebrated the anniversary of mexican independence mexico is a huge key partner about 40 of the people in the city of phoenix have uh direct ties to the country of mexico and so that relationship from a trade perspective but also family ties education people feel it in their daily lives but they also foreign direct investment is very much changing the face of my city right now we talked about tsmc and the global i hope the global return of manufacturing to the united states will have a tangible benefit tsmc's investment in phoenix is a success story for phoenix but it's also an american success story and there have been several pieces of important federal legislation that have helped make that possible so we are watching closely to see what happens with that global relationship but it matters for the 18 year old getting electronics certificate at community college or that pipe fitter who uh can just make a significant investment and um i think in the case of the one i know he's helping pay for his mother's um retirement because of the raise he got because of our foreign policy and tsmc being willing to invest in in our community so it does have real on the ground impacts on people's daily life well that's terrific it's good to know that because we sometimes wonder if what we're working on is relevant to people out there so it's it's terrific and lis listen unfortunately that is the all the time we have i didn't manage to get to baseball which is one of my coping mechanisms during economic economy the disrupted economy both of our teams unfortunately in washington and arizona are not doing so well this year but but there's always next year so good luck good luck to you with that but thank you mayor gallego it's been wonderful talking to you and we really appreciate your time and your insights and and ideas and thoughts thank you wonderful thank you so much for the work you're doing and for having me thank you so much and thank you to joanna for stepping in as co-host this week i really appreciate it and uh to our audience for us staying with us and and listening um always enjoy your comments and questions um and uh always have an open line uh please join us for another episode of economy disrupted next month where we'll be talking with another uh governor mayor local official and um hope to see you hope to see you then so thanks very much and bye-bye everyone you

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

Views: 418

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, bipartisan, policy, foreign relations, national security, think tank, politics, Economy Disrupted, Mayor Gallego, Phoenix, Arizona, finance

Id: MogjH7n_vh4

Length: 47min 27sec (2847 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021